A large majority of posters on forums all over the net seem to favor AVG.But,like yoda says;you get what you pay for.I switched to NOD32 recently and have no regrets,I do have more peace of mind though.LOL

Yes you do get what you pay for that's why I bought NAV. LOL... I juat had to find out what free ver. everyone would use if they couldn't get a pay ver. I see that on other boards people are talking highly about AVG. I never tried the prog.

I have used AVG for the past six months and am well satisfied with it. It has stopped several virus and script exploits. Its scan engine is relatively fast and it does not seem to give false positives. Their virus signature updates and many and regular. Their support is excellent. I have recommended it to several friends.

Let's make a distinction between those who want a program for free and those who need one through necessity. Usually, the best costs more but sometimes people can only get the best possible free programs.

For now I use AVG. In the future, when I am able, I will probably purchase NOD32.

since i am 11 years (7 years ago) old i "play around" with viruses and malware. f-prot was one of the most powerfull virus scanners. but since 3.x it got worse. very slow scan speed, very slow updates and reaction time, no online packer unpacking and so on.

f-prot has still a very powerfull variant detection based on 2 signatures (a family and a variant signature). but the engine is quite weak. a slow emulation, no unpacking of online compressed files and so on. besides the reaction time between a high outbreak and the ability to update the dos version is very high. in fact it has very serious problems with new malware (detecting and especially cleaning).

if i had to choose i would use trojancheck + antivir pe. antivir has many false positives (by the way, f-prot, too) but updates for new malware are very fast. the emulation is able to handle new malware, too. ok, it can't unpack exe packers ). trojancheck has a few bugs but is very well to fight against unknown worms and trojans.

Ok - created 50 unknown viruses. No one was found. The backdoors and trojans f-prot claims to be suspicious were found using fingerprinting - not using heuristics. Frisk was only too lazy to give them names ;o).

The reaction time of anti vir is about 3 hours if there are no complications. kav needed about 15 minutes and f-prot about 8 hours. all under 1 hour is good - all others bad.

First of all no one of the available free anti virus scanner is really good. Maybe that is the reason why they are free. I agree with Technodrome that F-Prot for DOS is out of the four the best one. The heuristic is not that bad (by the way Andreas did you check with the /AI switch?).

AntiVirPE has besites the missing packer support other negative issues. No real heurisitic feature. That means even to detect a simple VBS worm the program has to be updated. Also the macro virus detection is bad.

Wizard all I have to say is that lot of people get a free AV as a second AV. I use Norton as my main and my second AV is AVG6. I was thinking of using f-prot dos but having downloaded it yet. I have been really busy to download it lol.